Mine village a Shire vision

The Shire of Laverton is investigating the development of a miners’ village within its boundaries to access the economic benefits of new resources projects.

The northern Goldfields Shire has applied to the Department of Lands to release a reserve within the townsite for development as camp-style miners’ accommodation, similar to facilities operated by St Barbara in Leonora for fly-in, fly-out workers at the nearby Gwalia gold mine.

Shire chief executive Steven Deckert said a final decision was likely to be a couple of years away and required industry support but building a workers’ village in the town, about 400km north of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, would be the best way to realise local advantages from FIFO workforces.

“We’re getting a large parcel of land released, so you could have a mixture of mine site-type accommodation but also denser accommodation that doesn’t necessarily need to be one mining company — it could be two or three on this site,” he said.

“If you can incorporate those people into the town and not have them sitting on mine sites 20km, 30km, 100km out of town, certainly the ones closer to town should look at the opportunities in town.

“We’ll have the land ready to go if they need that, but they need to look at putting in services, roads and that sort of thing, which they would normally do anyway at a mine site.

“But it does give them the opportunity to get some people into town.”

It comes with emerging gold miner Dacian Gold nine months away from pouring its first ounce at the $197 million Mt Morgans Gold Project, just 20km west of Laverton, with workers staying at a 416-bed camp on site.

With little hope of securing all-residential workforces in remote mining communities, Mr Deckert said the Shire needed to pursue avenues to ensure those workers contributed to the town’s economy during their swing.

Last week, fellow gold hopeful Gold Road Resources announced it had signed a $298 million contract for a joint venture between AMEC Foster Wheeler and Civmec at the 13-year, multimillion-ounce Gruyere joint venture with Gold Fields, 200km north-east of Laverton.

About 300 workers will be mobilised to the site from August, while up to 50 will be based at Civmec’s construction facility in Perth.

Mr Deckert said he was hopeful the main FIFO workforce — once the mine was operational next year — would be complemented by a strong local contingent.

“Fly-in, fly-out is obviously the main source of where their workers are going to come from but it’s just as easy for someone living in Laverton to drive out there, do their two weeks on, three weeks on or whatever, and drive back to Laverton to be with their family,” he said.

“I would hope that’s an option they would pursue.”

A spokesman for Gold Road told the Kalgoorlie Miner the engineering, procurement and construction contract had local engagement targets built into it, with the project already providing work through local contractor Desert Sands and for native title owners, the Yilka people.